Inference and Reporting

Author

You, Scientist

Activity Objectives

Throughout this activity, you’ll practice the following skills.

  • Documenting and communicating a technical analysis.
  • Conducting statistical inference and communicating the results of those analyses transparently and clearly.
  • Choosing inferential techniques which are appropriate to answer your proposed research question(s).
  • Connecting the results of inference back to your original questions of interest and your associated hypotheses.
  • Transparently communicating your process by documenting and sharing your code in a manner that allows your research to be reproduced by other scientists.
  • Building a conclusion which ties together your entire project, from identifying your initial questions, to generating hypotheses, and through the resolutions of those initial questions and whether your hypotheses were confirmed, rebutted, or your results were inconclusive.

Your Tasks

Please complete the following tasks.

  1. Re-open your BioStatisticsAnalysis project and open the notebook you’ve been working in.
  2. Add a new section to your notebook, titled methodology or inference.
  3. Write an introductory paragraph for this section highlighting that you’ll be using “new” data, which was unseen during the exploratory analyses you ran earlier. Outline your chosen inference methods, clearly explaining how they will help in answering your hypotheses that were refined at the end of the exploratory analysis. Identify whether you’ll be using classical methods or simulation methods, and discuss why.
  4. Run your tests and/or construct your intervals, being sure to include and describe your code in your report.
  • Sharing your code is an important aspect of transparent science. In projects where a large code-base is utilized, researchers will either publish it as an appendix (so as not to distract from the discussion in the paper) or as an entire stand-alone repository.

  1. Interpret the results of your tests and intervals and provide answers to your questions of interest. Perhaps your hypotheses were confirmed – very interesting! Perhaps your hypotheses were not confirmed (you obtained insignificant results), or maybe you even found results opposite to what your hypotheses suggested – also, very interesting! Provide a robust discussion regarding what can be taken away from your inferential analysis.

  2. Write a conclusions section into your notebook which recaps your entire report, from initial questions of interests, through hypothesis generation, and resolution. Include any future questions of interest that you or a future researcher could investigate using this data or additional data if it is possible to collect. Are there any features/variables which were missing from your data set that you would have liked to have access to?

  3. Return to the abstract and edit it to reflect the question(s) of interest that you attempted to answer in this report. You’ll now update that abstract to include your findings.

  4. Use the Git tab in the top-right of your RStudio window to Pull -> Commit -> Push changes to your Repository on GitHub.

When all of this is done, you should have a nearly complete technical report. The sections you’ve written are the abstract, the introduction, the exploratory analysis, the methodology/inference section, and a conclusion. Go back and proofread your report, you’ll be shown how to share your report out with the world in our next notebook.